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Search Engines and Related Tools
A search engine is different from search software. The terms are used interchangeably by people, but they are not the same. Search software is an application – a bunch of codes – and a search engine is a collection of servers with a lot of data on it that is indexing the Internet and delivering it by HTML pages to customers. It is doing that by spidering around to get the information, usually from those metaname headers, and now increasingly from full text and putting that information up and comparing it, searching it. You all have some idea of how Google, Lycos, Bing, and all those other ones work, so you know what happens here. Again, a search engine is different from search software.
Read MoreWhy is a consultant not a “vendor?”
It’s time to consider “services” to be “products,” at least where meetings and conferences are concerned.
Wikipedia says “IBM treats its business as a service business. Although it still manufactures computers, it sees the physical goods as a small part of the “business solutions” industry. They have found that the price of demand for “business solutions” is much lower than for hardware. There has been a corresponding shift to a subscription pricing model. Rather than receiving a single payment for a piece of manufactured equipment, many manufacturers are now receiving a steady stream of revenue for ongoing contracts.” The change is significant.
Read MoreRDF: A Wrapper for Metadata
In information management, a wrapper is a program that translates tagged data into relational form, so that databases can deal with it. We’re interested in this because some of that tagged data includes subject terms, keywords, or whatever you want to call taxonomy terms that have been used to describe documents.
Read MoreDublin Core: Sort of a Metadata Standard
The Dublin Core metadata guidelines started in 1995 in Dublin, Ohio which is why they are called the Dublin Core. The beginning was actually in the basement of the OCLC building, in March of 1995. In April of 1996, the Dublin Core advocates went to Warwick, England, where they had another conference. So there are Warwick Conventions for the Dublin Core. So there’s no mystery about the names; these things are just named after the places where they started.
Read MoreTaxonomies and Metadata
Let’s talk about metadata a little bit. This is to give you a broad overview so that you know how to build those taxonomies. Metadata is data about data, which means it is really information about information. If you look at the metadata standards world and especially the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, it has suddenly taken flight again. It’s really interesting. Dublin Core is 10 years old or so and has suddenly become more relevant again.
Read MoreA Look at Markup Languages
The most frequently used markup languages these days are those of the SGML family: SGML, HTML, and XML. Information professionals are likely to encounter all three fairly often.
Read MoreA Brief History of Markup Languages
Let’s look at the history of the MLs a little bit. Those are the markup languages for computer text processing.
Markup languages started appearing in the 1960s. At that time, if you were a publisher, you would have your pages typeset by a professional typesetter or a typesetting company. The typesetters used to encode your data so that you couldn’t see the results until they generated the pages. The problem was that once a publisher had a large corpus of their publications set with a typesetter, they were handcuffed. They couldn’t leave very easily. Their data was so tied up with some particular typesetting system, the Penta system or whatever they were involved with. They couldn’t migrate. They couldn’t move. So, they were kind of imprisoned. The price kept going up every year because, well, “Where are you going to go? Hah!” It was very frustrating.
Read MoreTaxonomies and Standards
We’ve discussed what it takes to make the components of a digital information model work but one of the things that is most important, if you want it all to work together, is standards.
There are several controlled vocabulary standards, as well as networking protocols that have an impact on taxonomy implementation. There are also standards having to do with markup and with metadata and data modeling that impact thesauri.
Read MoreAdopting and Adapting Existing Word Lists and Taxonomies
In traditional taxonomy construction, you approach the body of knowledge, head for your ivory tower with its closed room and decide on the general structure of the field or discipline. From that single point, or perhaps multiple points, of knowledge, you are going to design a completely new taxonomy … and every now and then that works.
Read MoreMethodologies for Taxonomy and Thesaurus Creation
When you are building a thesaurus, you can build it from the original text or from a new intellectual area. You can build from an existing vocabulary or from an existing topic. You can do a combination of the two. What often happens is that you take your text and apply it to a taxonomy you think might be fairly parallel, and then you customize it to meet your own needs. That is very common practice and it gets you there faster.
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